Литагент HarperCollins - The Piano Teacher

Martin had an old schoolfriend, John, who worked at Dodwell’s, one of the trading firms, and had promised to greet the ship. He came with two friends and offered the new arrivals freshly squeezed guava drinks. Claire pretended to sip hers as her mother had warned her about the cholera that was rampant in these parts. The men were bachelors and very pleasant. John, Nigel, Leslie. They explained they all lived together in a mess – there were many, known by their companies’ names, Dodwell’s Mess, Jardine’s Mess, et cetera, and they assured Claire and Martin that Dodwell’s threw the best parties around.

They accompanied them to the government-approved hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, where a Chinese man with a long queue, dirty white tunic and shockingly long fingernails showed them to their room. They made an arrangement to meet for tiffin the next day and the men departed, leaving Martin and Claire sitting on the bed, exhausted and staring at one another. They didn’t know each other very well. They had been married barely four months.

She had accepted Martin’s proposal to escape the dark interior of her house, her bitter mother railing against everything, getting worse, it seemed, with her advancing age, and an uninspiring job as a filing girl in an insurance company. Martin was older, in his forties, and had never had luck with women. The first time he had kissed her, she had had to stifle the urge to wipe her mouth. He was like a cow, slow and steady. And kind. She knew this. She was grateful for it.

She had not had many chances with men. Her parents stayed at home all the time, so she had as well. When she had started seeing Martin – he was the older brother of one of the girls at work – she had had dinner at restaurants, drunk a cocktail at a hotel bar, and seen other young women and men talking, laughing, with an assurance she could not fathom. They had opinions about politics; they had read books she had never heard of and seen foreign films and talked about them with such confidence. She was enthralled and not a little intimidated. And then Martin had come to her, serious: his job was taking him to the Orient, and would she come with him? She was not so attracted to him, but who was she to be choosy? she thought, hearing the voice of her mother. She let him kiss her and nodded yes.

Claire had started to draw a bath in their hotel room when another knock on the door revealed a small Chinese woman, an amah, she was called, who started to unpack their suitcases until Martin shooed her away.

And that was how they had arrived in Hong Kong, which was like nothing Claire had imagined. Apart from the usual colonial haunts – all hush and genteel, potted palms and polished wood in whitewashed buildings – it was loud and crowded and dirty and bustling. The buildings were right next to each other and often had clothing hung out to dry on bamboo poles. There were garish vertical signs hung on every one, advertising massage parlours, pubs and hair salons. Someone had told her that opium dens still existed in back alleys. There was often refuse on the street, sometimes even human filth, and there was a pungent, peppery odour that was oddly clingy, attaching itself to your very skin until you went home for a good scrub.

There were all sorts of people. The local women carried their babies in a sort of back sling. Sikhs served as uniformed security guards – you saw them dozing off on wooden stools outside the banks, turbaned heads hanging heavily above their chests, rifles held loosely between their knees. The Indians had been brought over by the British, of course. Pakistanis ran carpet stores, Portuguese were doctors and Jews ran the dairy farms and other large businesses. There were British businessmen and American bankers, White Russian aristocrats and Peruvian entrepreneurs – all peculiarly well-travelled and sophisticated – and, of course, there were the Chinese, quite different in Hong Kong from the ones in China, she was told.

To her surprise, she didn’t detest Hong Kong, as her mother had told her she would – she found the streets busy and distracting, so very different from Croydon, and filled with people and shops and goods she had never seen before. She liked to sample the local bakery goods, the pineapple buns and yellow egg tarts, and sometimes wandered outside Central, where she would quickly find herself in unfamiliar surroundings, where she might be the only non-Chinese around. The fruit stalls were heaped with not only oranges and bananas, still luxuries in post-war England, but spiky, strange-looking fruits she came to try and like: starfruit, durian, lychee. She would buy a dollar’s worth and be handed a small, waxy brown bag and she would eat the fruit slowly as she walked. There were small stalls made of crudely nailed wood and corrugated tin, which housed small speciality enterprises: this one sold chops, the stone stamps the Chinese used in place of signatures, this one made only keys, this one had a chair that was rented for half-days by a street dentist and a barber.

The locals ate on the street in tiny restaurants called daipaidong , and she had seen three workmen in dirty singlets and trousers crouched over a plate containing a whole fish, spitting out the bones at their feet. One had seen her watching them, and deliberately picked up the fish’s eyeball with his chopsticks, raised it up to her, smiling, before he ate it.

Claire hadn’t met many Chinese people before, but the ones she had seen in the big towns in England had been serving in restaurants or ironing clothes. There were many of those types in Hong Kong, of course, but what had been eye-opening was the sight of the affluent Chinese, the ones who seemed English in all but their skin colour. It had been quite something to see a Chinese step out of a Rolls-Royce, as she had one day when she was waiting on the steps of the Gloucester Hotel, or in business suits, having lunch with British men who talked to them as if they were the same. She hadn’t known that such a world existed. And then, with Locket, she was thrust into this world.

After a few months settling in, finding a flat and furnishing it, Claire had put the word out that she was looking for a job giving piano lessons, ‘as a lark’, was how she put it – something to fill the day, but the truth was, they could really use the extra money. She had played the piano most of her life and was primarily self-taught, but she didn’t think it would matter. Amelia, an acquaintance she had met at a sewing circle, said she would ask around.

She rang a few days later.

‘There’s a Chinese family, the Chens. They run everything in town. Apparently, they’re looking for a piano teacher for their daughter, and they’d prefer an Englishwoman. What do you think?’

‘A Chinese family?’ Claire said. ‘I hadn’t thought about that possibility. Aren’t there any English families looking?’

‘No,’ Amelia said. ‘Not that I’ve been able to ascertain.’

‘I just don’t know …’ Claire demurred. ‘Wouldn’t it be odd?’ She couldn’t imagine teaching a Chinese girl. ‘Does she speak English?’

‘Probably better than you or me,’ Amelia said impatiently. ‘They’re offering a very adequate fee.’ She named a large sum.

‘Well,’ Claire said slowly, ‘I suppose it couldn’t do any harm to meet them.’

Victor and Melody Chen lived in the Mid-Levels, in an enormous white two-storey house on May Road. There was a driveway with potted plants lining the sides. Inside, there was the quiet, efficient buzz of a household staffed with plentiful servants. Claire had taken a bus and when she arrived, she was perspiring after the walk from the road to the house.

The amah led her to a sitting room, where she found a fan blowing blessedly cool air. A houseboy adjusted the drapes so that she was properly shaded. Her blue linen skirt, just delivered from the tailor, was wrinkled and she had on a white voile blouse that was splotched with moisture. She hoped the Chens would allow her some time to compose herself. She shifted, feeling a drop of perspiration trickle down her thigh.